NewSouth Publishing

The Enemy at Home - Award Winner

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:30:14 +1000

Congratulations to authors Nadine Helmi and Gerhard Fischer on the award win at the NSW National Trust Heritage Awards.

Anzac mythology

Craig Stockings — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +1000

Australian military history is a field of study under constant siege by Anzac mythology. Like most national myths, Anzac is based on inspiring narratives, concepts and images about a country’s past. It serves as an important unifying representation and affirms a set of self-perceived national values. It contains symbolic meaning and has often served social and political purposes. In some respects Anzac even fulfils a secular religious function. Importantly, it is based on, but does not necessarily reflect, historical fact. Anzac involves fictionalised exaggerations of actual incidents, commonly disregards inconvenient historical details, and in some ways subverts or re-invents the past to fit the legend.

The grand themes and narratives of Anzac are seldom the fruits of scholarly analysis or critical interpretation. As long as so much modern-day Australian nationalism, sense of self, and collective identity are sourced from the imagery of past conflicts then we will continue to draw what we need from the past without worrying too much about what actually occurred. This is not a harmless phenomenon. The persistent misunderstanding and misrepresentation that Anzac mythology often represents skews proper understandings and interpretations of this nation’s military heritage. At its worst it can warp and twist our perceptions of war and even shape our picture of ourselves in obscuring and inaccurate ways. Moreover, they tend to situate our attitudes to the past falsely, and therefore distort our reading of the present and expectations for the future.

In Zombie Myths of Australian Military History (2010) and its companion volume Anzac’s Dirty Dozen (2012) a range of Australia’s leading military historians tackle a selection of the most enduring historical misconceptions of this nation’s military past. The authors recognised from the very beginning that the subjects under discussion, and their conclusions, might set them on a collision course with the Anzac legend in the minds of many readers. At one level, we embrace this: the legend should not substitute for history. It is a myth, and however powerful and pervasive, it has obscured more about the past than it has revealed. But at another level this collision is entirely unnecessary. We are historians. We do not seek to undermine some of the foundation stones of Anzac for the ‘pleasure’ of appearing subversive. Nor do we reject the idea that some social good can flow from the Anzac legend – despite the exclusive nature of its white, Anglo-Saxon, male and ‘macho’ orientation. All we ask is that legend not be mistaken for history.

National Biography Award 2012

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:00:30 +1000

Congratulations to both Delia Falconer (for Sydney) and Sophie Cunningham (for Melbourne) - both of whom have been long listed for the 2012 National Biography Award.

Just another journalist's memoir?

Mike Carlton — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +1000

Broadcaster, writer and columnist Mike Carlton on Come the Revolution by Alex Mitchell, at Gleebooks, Sydney

It occurs to me that some of you might be approaching this book with some caution. And I can understand why. It’s another journalist’s memoir.

I’ve read a couple of these recently – the great and good of the media trade looking back in tranquility upon their brilliant careers and admiring what they saw. Navel gazing par excellence.

No names. But some of the stuff was a bit like chomping through one of those packet chocolate puddings you get at the supermarket – a lump of stodge and a sticky, congealed sauce at the bottom. Oscar Wilde described foxhunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible. A good many media memoirs are the unreadable in pursuit of the improbable.

Now I should declare an interest. Mitchell and I are old mates.

But I am here tonight to assure you, at the risk of my own reputation, that his book is very different. As indeed the title might suggest. Come the Revolution. A bold title, I think. No room for subtlety there. A grim tract, you might think, too.

But no. It crackles with wit and good humour. At times with piercing insight. But best of all, I think, it is illuminated by a self-deprecating scepticism – which I happen to believe is the mark of a good journalist. Alex never pretends to have all the answers. But, by God, he knows the questions.

Delightfully, he can tell a story against himself. Sometimes a hilarious one from, say, his first feeble days as a wet-behind-the-ears cub reporter in Mt Isa. Or the roaring days of the Sydney afternoon paper wars.

Sometimes a story of infinite horror … when as a young reporter, 26 years old, he was sent off to cover the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War.

Biafra is utterly forgotten now. A footnote in the unending catalogue of African tragedy. In the late 1960s, it was front page stuff. Perhaps 3 million people died from the war and the hunger and disease it brought about. Alex was so shattered by it, so confronted by his own very human impotence, that he could barely write about the atrocities he had seen. In that sense, he failed as a reporter. He admits it. Only now has he been able to put it down.

But the book is by no means all bleak. Far from it. It rocks along. Here was a young man on a mission to change the world. A country boy from Townsville. A red-ragging Trotskyite revolutionary working for Rupert Murdoch – which you don’t see a lot of these days. A seasoned and sceptical observer of Australian politics and society, state and federal.

And a good writer. He learned his craft well: tell ‘em what happened in the first paragraph, then give ‘em the adjectives. So many young journalists these days think they’re writing a novel: it was a fine and sunny morning when Joe Blow caught the bus to work. Only in the 7^th paragraph do you find he was fatally Tasered by a police officer on Bondi beach.

Best of all, Alex thrived in that heyday, the high watermark of newspaper journalism of the 70s and 80s. An era, an epoch, if you like, that we will never see again. Roistering, rollicking tabloid journalism – exciting stuff then, but now of course, mired in the sewers of the News International phone hacking scandal.

And at the other extreme, he was part of some of the finest journalism that newspapers have produced. The great Insight team on London’s Sunday Times, which broke story after story – on the fine principle that one very good purpose of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Alex was one of the exodus of young Australians who arrived in London in the 1960s and put a bomb under the complacency and hypocrisy of a society riven by class and ruled by a crumbling establishment of hereditary privilege and stolen wealth. The shockwaves reverberated back to this country … which was then run along much the same lines.

The thing I like best about Alex and, indeed, this book – is that he hasn’t given up. So many of our peers who were journalistic firebrands at the barricades of the 60s and 70s became, in their later years, craven reactionaries of the right. Discovering where their bread was buttered, they wolfed it down.

The late Paddy McGuinness springs to mind here – a volatile anarchist in his salad days – he, like so many of his ilk, subsided into a fat and fawning, claret-pickled caricature of the Tory plutocrats who signed his paycheques. Piers Akerman is another.

Not our Mitchell. Not our Alex.

If the fires of his youth are not still leaping to the sky, at least the coals are burning bright.

What would Rick Farley do?

Nicholas Brown — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +1100

Rick Farley's biographers, Nicholas Brown and Susan Boden, reflect on his legacy.

In the 1980s and ’90s, agricultural politics in Australia had one master pragmatist: Rick Farley (1952–2006). In his many public roles, from head of the National Farmers’ Federation to campaigner for Aboriginal land rights, Farley negotiated the problems at the heart of Australians’ relationship with the land – the restructure and globalisation of agriculture, landscape erosion, and contested land ownership between Aboriginal peoples and farmers.

When asked to review A Way Through, our biography of Rick Farley, Tim Flannery and Laura Tingle focused on different but complementary aspects. Tim Flannery wrote of Farley’s work for a ‘sustainable and united Australia’, while Laura Tingle contrasted his practical, respectful approach to ‘our current ugly politics’. Both point to the gaps that Rick Farley’s death has left in the physical and political landscape of Australia.

While a biography looks back to the times of its subject, Farley’s very recent death in 2006 and the ongoing impact of ‘his’ issues gives his biography a contemporary flavour. ‘What would Rick Farley do?’ is a question that sits in the back of our minds, and in the minds of many of the 300 people we interviewed for the book. What would he do about a carbon tax, immigration, coal seam gas, the Northern Territory intervention and water allocation in the Murray-Darling Basin? What would he suggest to achieve progress in a hung federal parliament? What might he think about the role of protest and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy?

Farley would have had views on all these issues, but his overwhelming contribution would be in the form of a process – a ‘way through’ – as the title of his biography suggests. Though this process was a reflection of his character, it was not built on personality alone. Farley had a well thought-out approach to reaching agreement in complex situations.

For Farley, the issue needed to be real. The parties that came to the negotiating table needed the authority to make decisions and a willingness to put their ideas forward. People needed to be given a chance to speak and know that their viewpoints were understood by everyone in the room. Negotiations needed to be in the present, informed by history, but without drifting back into a past that couldn’t be changed. Agreements needed practical anchors: people needed to understand their roles and finances, and make sure solid administration was in place. As Farley argued, ‘it is not the best deal possible, but the best possible deal’.

In an age of spin, where a trivial stumble becomes viral in seconds and so many outlets exist for ‘opinion’, Farley’s way still seems radically fresh. We live in fragile environmental and economic times. Cynicism, suspicion and anxiety have become the language of political discussion. For Tim Flannery to describe a future for Australia that is united creates a moment of hope for us. That he identifies Rick Farley as a vital unifier of his times creates a link to the present. Rick Farley’s ‘time’ is now.

The story of mathematics

Dana Mackenzie — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +1100

Leopold Kronecker, a nineteenth-century German mathematician, once said ‘God created the integers; all else is the work of man’.

Although it is not entirely clear how literally one should take his witticism, historically he is far from alone in suggesting a divine origin for mathematics. In ancient Mesopotamia, it was a gift from Nisaba, the patron goddess of scribes. ‘Nisaba, the woman radiant with joy, the true woman, the scribe, the lady who knows everything, guides your fingers on the clay,’ wrote a scribe in the 20th century BC. ‘Nisaba generously bestowed upon you the measuring rod, the surveyor’s gleaming line, the yardstick, and the tablets which confer wisdom.’ On Babylonian mathematical tablets, the solution to a problem was never complete until the solver wrote, ‘Praise Nisaba!’ at the end.

According to the ancient Chinese, the originator of mathematics was Fu Xi, the legendary first emperor of China. He is often depicted holding a carpenter’s square. ‘Fu Xi created the eight trigrams in remote antiquity to communicate the virtues of the gods,’ wrote the third-century mathematician Liu Hui. In addition, he says, Fu Xi ‘invented the nine-nines algorithm to coordinate the variations in the hexagrams.’ The trigrams and hexagrams are the basic units of Chinese calligraphy; thus, in a loose sense, Fu Xi is being credited with the invention of writing, while the ‘nine-nines algorithm’ means the multiplication table. Thus, mathematics was not only divinely inspired, but was invented at the same time as written language.

We can already discern in these accounts three distinct branches of mathematics, which have continued to flow abundantly over the centuries since then. The first branch is arithmetic or algebra, the science of quantity; the second is geometry, the science of shape; and the third is applied mathematics, the science of translating mathematics into solutions to concrete problems of engineering, physics, and economics.

A fourth wellspring is not apparent in the above quotes, and that is the science of the infinite – the analysis of both infinitely large and infinitely small quantities, which are essential to understand any process of continuous motion or change. Mathematicians simply call this branch of mathematics ‘analysis’, even though the rest of the world interprets this word to mean something quite different.

Thus, I consider the four main tributaries of mathematics to be Algebra, Geometry, Applied Mathematics, and Analysis. All four of them mingle together and cooperate in a most wonderful way, and witnessing this interaction is one of the great joys of being a mathematician. Nearly every mathematician finds himself or herself drawn more to one of these tributaries than the others, but the beauty and power of the subject undoubtedly derives from all four.

This is an edited extract from The Universe in Zero Words: The story of mathematics by Dana Mackenzie, published by NewSouth.

Mr JW Lewin, painter and naturalist

Richard Neville — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +1100

John William Lewin is one of Australia’s most imaginative and engaging – but least known – colonial artists. If anyone knows anything about him – he landed in Sydney in January 1800 – it is the story of his missing the boat which was supposed to bring him to NSW. This mistake was compounded by his wife being on the ship he missed (she left for NSW without him) and by the next ship for the colony, on which he took a passage, being delayed in Ireland for 12 months.

This story defines Australia’s first free professional artist as an incompetent who bumbled his way through colonial life, not only missing the boat, but also losing a whole print-run of his second book, Birds of New Holland, which was published in London in 1808 but somehow never made it to Australia.

But, in fact, Lewin, who died in Sydney in August 1819 in a new large two-storey house of eight rooms on two acres near the southern end of Hyde Park, could have looked back at his colonial career with some satisfaction. He would have appreciated, as a working-class artisan from London, that his tombstone referred to him as JW Lewin Esquire, elevating him to the rank of a gentleman.

Had Lewin remained in London, working in his profession as a natural history illustrator, it is unlikely that he would have achieved any distinction or social success, being a very small fish in a very large pond. In Sydney he was the only natural history illustrator in town, one of its few professional artists, and his paintings decorated the walls of Government House.

But the most interesting thing about Lewin is his art. He came to NSW with the intention of publishing illustrated books about its natural history. It was important, he rightfully felt, to work from specimens captured in the colony, rather than working from the often poorly preserved skins and inadequate notes which made it to Europe.

When he arrived in NSW he was steeped in the traditions of conventional English natural history illustration, which focused on a specimen isolated without context on a page. Initially Lewin struggled to find specimens, telling a patron that everything in colonial natural history was contrary to ‘our known knowledge in England’. But once he overcame this challenge, his illustrations suddenly evolved into exquisitely observed, strikingly composed and dynamic images, completely unlike anything he had done before, or indeed was being made by his contemporaries in Europe. His work puts paid to the notion that colonial artists could not properly see gum trees until the Heidelberg school of the 1890s!

It is as if confronting and mastering NSW natural history suddenly ignited some completely unexpected spark of creativity. His images of Australia’s birds, insects, plants and animals are wonderful and surprisingly modern. He locates his subjects in their actual environment, which was then an innovation to be developed by later naturalists like John James Audubon or John Gould. Lewin himself was not a scientist and he could not properly describe his subjects in the language of science. Part of the marvel of his art is that he devised his formula almost in complete isolation from fellow naturalists and artists.

Lewin’s story demonstrates that early colonial history is a lot more than a narrative of brutality and isolation. There is no doubt that colonial life could be harsh and unforgiving, but the other side of it – aspiration, opportunity and social mobility – was equally part of the story. John Lewin’s colonial life exemplifies how quickly and easily Europeans embraced the new country: in 1803 Lewin complained of the contrariness of Australia, by 1812 he described it as one of the finest countries in the world!

Mr JW Lewin, Painter & Naturalist (NewSouth) is the first full-length account of this intriguing artist and individual. The book is published to coincide with an exhibition, Lewin; Wild Art, held at the State Library of NSW, from 5 March to 27 May 2012 and then in the National Library of Australia from 28 July to 28 October 2012.

Design commandments

Tony Seddon — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +1100

Thou shall not use Comic Sans

Well, we had to put it in, didn’t we? Comic Sans is arguably the most inappropriately used typeface in history after its first appearance in 1995. It was designed for Microsoft a year earlier by Vincent Connare (who incidentally is very philosophical about his notoriety among type fans) to supply user-friendly menus for people who were a bit scared of computers. When it was included as one of the font choices in Windows 95, it took off faster than a speeding bullet. Everyone with a PC and the notion they could do ‘graphic design’ started using it on their home-grown letterheads, party invites, curriculum vitaes, shop signs, haulage firm truck-sides and, well, you get the picture.

Comic Sans wasn’t designed to do all these things, so why did everyone like it so much? Connare himself thinks people like to use it because ‘it’s not like a typeface’. Ouch! What better reason can there be to not use Comic Sans?

Thou shall use Comic Sans ironically

Did I just say you shouldn’t use Comic Sans? Well, I was only kidding. One of the great things about typefaces that become vilified due to inappropriate application or overuse is they gain a platform from which they can be used to portray irony, sarcasm, satire, dry wittedness, and so on. If you’ve got a dispiriting message that you want to make light of, for instance ‘Turning 46 next week and really happy about it – party on!’, Comic Sans might just be the typeface of choice. The problem here is, unless everyone you’re inviting to your birthday bash is a graphic designer, they won’t get it. Using type ironically can be very effective and indeed great fun, but only if the irony isn’t wasted.

Therefore, think carefully before you decide to use Comic Sans, or Childs Play, or Dot Matrix, or Bullets Dingbats, or any other novelty typeface for any project that requires anyone to work out why you chose the type in the first place. If the joke isn’t immediately transparent, you should probably have gone for Times New Roman instead. Ha ha – do you get it? No?

Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans: 365 graphic design commandments by Sean Adams, Peter Dawson, John Foster and Tony Seddon is published by NewSouth.

Playground duty

Ned Manning — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +1100

I approached the end of seventeen years teaching at Newtown High School of the Performing Arts with a mixture of emotions. I was excited about leaving Sydney for a new adventure in Melbourne. I knew I’d been at Newtown for long enough. Seventeen years in the one place is long enough for anybody. I even knew how I was going to leave – by taking a group of kids to perform in China and by doing a production of Blackrock.

I’d had a peripatetic teaching career, interrupted by fifteen years as an actor and interspersed with various acting and writing jobs. There were things I loved about teaching and things that I hated. There were things about how schools function that drove me around the bend. I created a niche for myself but it was hard work and I spent a lot of time shaking my head.

So, how can I now synthesise all these conflicting thoughts?

I’m a writer. I have mainly written plays but even those have been about things I care about. Maybe one of their common failings is that they are about things. I’ve been accused of writing 'message plays'. I didn’t ever take this as criticism.

My first play, Us or Them, was a vaguely autobiographical piece about my early years as a teacher. It was surprisingly successful. I didn’t take myself seriously as a playwright as I was too busy trying to take myself seriously as an actor. I wrote more plays as I waited for acting jobs and the 'big break' that sort of came but passed me by when I wasn’t looking.

So I couldn’t write Us or Them 2. I couldn’t write another play about teaching. Nor could I leave the profession without saying something, without expressing all those pent-up emotions and letting loose all those festering thoughts.

It occurred to me that I might write a book. Don’t ask me why this occurred to me. I’d never written a book. I’d only had time to whack out a few half-formed plays. Still, the thought grew and grew and became a minor obsession. I had no idea what I’d write about and it was really only a fantasy anyway.

The trouble with me is that I like the idea of realising fantasies – not the ones we usually associate with 'fantasies’ but the ones to do with dreams, like performing at the Opera House or playing cricket for Australia. So the idea of a book about teaching started taking hold of my imagination.

Then fate stepped in. We took the kids to Cockatoo Island for an excursion around the old convict gaols – a very Sydney thing to do. We ran into some friends and on the way home on the ferry I struck up a conversation with one of them who happened to be a publisher with NewSouth. We’d talked before about a kids' play I wrote that I was trying to flog, and she was very helpful at the time – the play has since been published and is doing very well.

Some people, including my partner, would baulk at pitching an idea to a friend you’d bumped into on a ferry on a sunny Sunday afternoon but not me. I’ve never been one for protocol. No one ever explained it to me. Or maybe it was a reaction to the absurd upbringing I'd had. Whatever it was, I told Phillipa that I had an idea for a book. Before I could finish the sentence, she cut me off and told me she’d been meaning to get in touch with me. She wanted to talk to me about writing a book about teaching.

I nearly fell into the harbour.

We arranged to meet and the rest, as they say, is history. Or Playground Duty.

60th annual APA Design Awards

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:46:17 +1100

Both Mad Dog (Peter Corris) and The Flight Attendant's Shoe (Prudence Black) are shortlisted in the 2012 APA Book Design Awards. The awards will be presented at a ceremony on 17 May.

Lucky country?

Barbara Pocock — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +1100

Did you know Australia ranks sixth among twenty-eight countries surveyed by the OECD in terms of average hours worked by full-timers? We’re meant to be the easygoing country, yet full-time workers in Australia work on average, per week, two hours longer than Germans, almost three more than the French and five more than most Nordic countries.

Australia is now a long way from the relaxed land of the long weekend and extended beach holiday. Many Australians are living in a ‘time bomb’: squeezed by the demands of work and care as we put together our jobs, home and community life in a changing society. Many Australians say they are fatigued, don’t get enough sleep, don’t take their holidays, and struggle to find the time for their relationships and families. Many feel they spend too much time commuting.

Australian men and women now live in complex regimes of working time and place. Managers, professional workers, women, carers and the sizeable proportion who work long hours or who lack control over their working time are most affected. Many jobs are now very intensive, and weaker boundaries around the time and space of work (fuelled by new technologies) mean that work spills out to affect our home time, leisure time and personal lives.

Julia Gillard reveres 'decent, hard-working' citizens, but how do we manage patterns of hard work that spin out of control? If we are all work and no play, how are our work and our larger life affected?

The time squeeze affects our ability to increase skills and qualifications. People who are tired and overcommitted struggle to learn new skills. This has implications for how Australians respond to new challenges like climate change. Time pressures work against simple environmental actions like sorting rubbish, walking to the shops or catching the bus to work. They also affect productivity and workplace management: tired people don’t make effective workers or good managers.

Many of the costs of workaholism or intensive job demands are hidden: in the health budget in the form of poor mental and physical health, in errors we make at work when we are tired, and in stretched relationships at home and at work.

How can we defuse the time bomb we are sitting on? When people have access to flexible working arrangements, and well-planned transport and sub/urban settings, then they find it easier to learn and to utilise their skills, improving productivity and workplace outcomes.

The notion of ‘work–life balance’ is pathetically inadequate to the task. Individuals can do only so much in the face of greedy workplaces, poorly planned transport or urban planning. The idea of work–life balance puts the clever, juggling individual at the centre of work–life success. It can mean a lot to workers to have the flexibility to juggle the two worlds of work and home, but – as many working carers know – this juggle and the workplace flexibility that enables it just create the right to perpetual exhaustion, as we dash from home to work, to care, to the shops, and back to the home computer late at night.

Moreover, many people are not ‘masters of their own universe’, controlling how things fit together in terms that allow the easy construction of well-articulated jobs, families and rich community relations. Some people are increasingly excluded by current arrangements and, in a rich first-world country like Australia, there are many things citizens, governments, employers, developers, unions and community service providers can do better. Taking control of the length of the working day, managing technologies and workloads better, increasing flexibility and providing more leave are good places to start.

Barbara Pocock, Natalie Skinner and Philippa Williams are authors of the new book Time Bomb: Work, rest and play in Australia today, published by NewSouth and launched by the Premier of South Australia on 12 February.

Staying cool naturally

Nick Hollo — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +1100

It’s another stinking hot day, you feel sticky and tired. What can you do to keep cool inside your home?

Well, let’s start with keeping the sun out. Shade all the glazing. Light-coloured shading is better because it is reflective. Dark colours absorb heat. It is much better to shade outside your windows than rely solely on curtains inside. Once the sun shines through the glass, the warmth inside has different radiant properties and won’t go back out through the glass as easily as it came in. Paved, glary areas are hotter and more reflective. So, shading the whole surrounding garden area of your home is a good idea.

If you are renovating or building new, it is better to minimise glazing on the west and east, as the prolonged, low-angle summer sun in the morning and afternoon is hard to keep out. The north side can be simply shaded from summer sun by an overhanging roof or pergola. This will still allow the lower, winter sun to shine in.

You can greatly reduce the heat coming through the roof, ceiling and walls with insulation. A combination of reflective foil and bulk insulation is a good idea in the roof space. But remember that if you insulate your home without shading your windows, it’ll be hotter because the heat coming through the windows will be trapped inside.

Would it help to open the windows during the day for ventilation?

In humid conditions, you need air flow to cool down by evaporative cooling. However, if it is hotter outside than inside, it is smarter not to open the windows and wait till it cools down at night to flush the hot air from the house.

You can help capture the breeze by the way the window opens or by using screen walls or hedges outside the house to deflect the air flow to where you want it. Insect-screening a whole veranda provides an outdoor area free of insects and does not impede air flow as much as screening each window.

Finally, you can make your home stay cooler longer if the inside is made up of heavier materials, such as brick, earth or concrete. These heavy building materials need more heat to warm up, so they warm up or cool down slowly. They have thermal mass. Having solid masonry walls and concrete floors inside the house and shading them from the sun in summer will help to keep the inside cooler.

Nick Hollo is the author of Warm House Cool House: Inspirational designs for low-energy housing, second edition out now from Choice Books.

News and chat

Barbara Alysen — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +1100

One of the surprises of the Sydney Festival this year was the lecture by American public radio program maker Ira Glass. It lacked the spectacle of many of the other Festival events: just a man, a microphone and an iPad. But this presenter, of a niche weekly radio program from Chicago, packed the Sydney Town Hall two times over. How come?

Audiences for traditional information media, including the nightly television news, have been contracting for years. Yet here was a reminder that something as old-fashioned as documentary radio could find a large audience that crossed international boundaries.

Speculating on the failure of traditional media to maintain audiences, Glass wondered whether the voice of broadcast news was now too formal for a world in which so much information is delivered by social media and is conversational in tone.

There’s a compelling, and for mainstream broadcasters, life or death, issue here. How does the nightly news maintain its authority while competing with all the voices in the new media? Is the traditional idea of ‘authority’ in news delivery even important any more?

The first Australian television news bulletins aired straight after the nightly religious program. God, then news. Today the news is programmed to follow game shows, infotainments and drama. Television news has evolved with the medium. It’s faster-paced, more visual and yes, more conversational than ever before. The presenter is just as likely to be a woman as a man, sometimes more likely. But the format still owes much to the earliest broadcasts.

Which makes this year’s summer schedule a fascinating experiment. Six p.m. is traditionally news time. But switch on now and on two of the five main free-to-air channels you will see news-based chat. The Drum (ABC) and The Project (Ten) aren’t the first time channels have taken an irreverent or opinionated approach to news (think Graham Kennedy and Clive Robertson and now Jon Stewart in the US). But what’s happening here is something new, even allowing for the differences in intention and approach between the two programs.

These news-talk programs are interview-based and they draw on a diverse range of people and perspectives. They are loosely structured and entertaining. But, even when packaged as comedy, as The Project is, they are very informative, giving audiences the background to stories that traditional news programs, with their short items, often can’t fit in.

There’s already considerable evidence that young viewers prefer their news packaged in less traditional, less serious, more entertaining ways. Combine that with the fact that chat-based programs come relatively cheap, and this year’s summer news and current affairs schedule may have an impact that lasts well beyond the season.

Barbara Alysen has been a reporter and producer in commercial and public-sector radio and television. She is the author of The Electronic Reporter, third edition out now from UNSW Press.

The sportsmen of Changi

Kevin Blackburn — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +1100

15 February 2012 marks the day 70 years ago when 130,000 British, Australian, and Indian soldiers surrendered to the Japanese at the fall of Singapore. Some historians, even today, in order to easily explain away the rapid fall of Singapore, refer to all these men as troops of ‘a poor quality’.

In fact, the soldiers surrendering at Singapore had among them a considerable number of elite athletes at the peak of their physical fitness. In addition, there were many more active amateur sportsmen from the interwar years. This was a time when male identity was strongly defined by how well a man played his chosen sport. More elite and fit amateur sportsmen were captured at Singapore than in any other war zone. The surrender had little to do with the quality of the men doing the fighting.

Two days after the surrender, on 17 February 1942, 50,000 British and Australian prisoners of war made their way into Changi prisoner of war camp. With the Australians was the last Test wicketkeeper to play against England before the outbreak of the war, Ben Barnett. The British prisoners had with them nine English county cricket players, such as the later famous cricket commentator, E.W. Swanton, and Geoffrey Edrich of the equally famous English Test cricket Edrich family.

Among the inmates of Changi were elite football players from the major codes.

For rugby union, there was a Scottish and an Irish international. The Australian ranks contained three rugby players from the tour of England that was cancelled when it reached England on 2 September 1939, the day before war broke out. These included ‘Blow’ Ide whose father was a Japanese immigrant, and Cecil Ramalli, whose father was Indian and mother Aboriginal. There were three other Australian players captured at Singapore who would play for their country after the war.

Australian Rules Footballers, who had played at the highest level of their sport – the Victorian Football League – included the Brownlow medal legend of the 1930s, ‘Chicken’ Smallhorn, as well as ‘Peter’ Chitty and Lou Daily.

Going into captivity were three first-grade Australian rugby league players who had competed in the Sydney premiership. The best known was Jack Lennox, who took to the field for the leading clubs of St George and South Sydney.

For soccer, the British prisoners of war at Changi included two players from the English Football League’s first division. Albert Hall was a forward with Tottenham Hotspur before he joined up. Johnny Sherwood was a winger in the Reading team, which won the wartime premiership, the 1941 War Cup Final.

With numerous elite sportsmen in Changi, it is little wonder that high-quality games were often played within the camp. Swanton called the ‘Australia’ versus ‘England’ cricket matches, led by Barnett and Edrich as captains, as ‘Cricket De luxe’. The different codes of football were played so regularly and seriously that they were banned within a year because of the drain that injuries placed on medical supplies.

Even more extraordinarily, the elite sportsmen continued to play their chosen sports when they had time at the camps on the Burma-Thailand Railway, despite their bodies being badly weakened by being almost worked to death by the Japanese. Then, after the war, when they returned home, unbelievably, many simply signed up for the 1946 sports season and resumed their sports careers.

Ever since he moved to Singapore from Australia in 1993, Kevin Blackburn has followed the veterans’ footsteps, walking through the battlefields and visiting their places of captivity. He teaches history at Nanyang Technological University and is the author of The Sportsmen of Changi, published by NewSouth.

Calling science writers

Elizabeth Finkel — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +1100

UNSW Press is running a science writing competition. Some of the outstanding pieces will also make it into the 2012 edition of The Best Australian Science Writing.

As this year’s editor, I’d like to heartily encourage new science writers and particularly working scientists to try their hand. I used to be a research scientist and I know I owe much of my success to the fact that I can pick out the great stories from the thicket of scientific advance.

So here are my tips.

The fundamental is you have to explain something ‘new’ to the reader. You should write as if they have little prior knowledge but are smart and interested. You have to conjure the reader in your mind and talk to them – perhaps conjure up your mother or a curious friend. Contextualise the subject for them – how does the finding of the Higgs boson reach through into the worldview of your Mum?

The best subjects to pick are those that get you excited; your excitement will be conveyed to the reader. You should also have an excellent understanding of the subject. That will allow you to write with an insouciant tone. And that can take a lot of work. For example, if you’re not a particle physicist making sense of the Higgs boson will take some grunt. But it’s never impossible.

Once you understand the science thoroughly, you need to apply some art. Pick up that misshapen clay of words and turn it around every which way. See how to sculpt it. Try to explain it to friends, muse while you walk or run – my muse always meets me at the third bend of the creek in the Glen Iris wetlands.

And borrow from the fiction writers. Bring your story to life by putting in the props. Describe place, the main protagonist, the atmosphere. I like descriptions that are like Japanese brush-stroke paintings: a few strokes to sketch the subject.

And when you have your first draft, find a smart, critical person who likes good writing, to read it. The more people read it, the better. Criticism is gold – take it on board.

Elizabeth Finkel has written for Science, Lancet, Nature Medicine, New Scientist and The Age, among others, and has broadcast for ABC Radio National. She is the author of Stem Cells: Controversy at the Frontiers of Science and The Genome Generation. Elizabeth will edit The Best Australian Science Writing 2012, coming soon from NewSouth Publishing.

Click here for more information on The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing.

She Sails

Diana Bagnall — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +1100

One morning in late September 2009, my skipper Alex and I were anchored at Horseshoe Bay, around the back of Magnetic Island, as fine a place as any to loiter a while in a boat. We were slowly heading down the coast from Far North Queensland. By then we’d been sailing for four months. Our 'shakedown cruise' was primarily designed to test whether I had the stomach for the bigger and better things which he had long dreamed of doing in a yacht, preferably offshore. I loved sailing, but was fearful that living on a boat meant the end of intelligent life as I’d known it.

By chance, by sheer chance, on our way out of Horseshoe Bay, we crossed paths with the Alaskans. It is perhaps an exaggeration to date my rebirth as a cruising sailor to this meeting, but not a huge one. I was open to persuasion, but then again, in Mike Litzow and his wife Alisa we met a couple as intensely alive to the world (and literate to boot) as we are ever likely to know on land or at sea.

Alex and I were finishing breakfast that morning, and thinking about pulling up the anchor when I saw a young woman rowing our way. She had a little boy with her. I guessed they were off the sturdy, double-ended yacht which we’d noticed anchored nearby the previous evening. Alex identified her (correctly) as a Crealock 37, a cruising boat not often seen in Australia – ‘the choice of serious offshore sailors’, he said approvingly. Her name was Pelagic, and her home port was Kodiak, Alaska – the other end of the earth.

The woman, who introduced herself as Alisa, and her son as Elias, was on a fact-finding mission. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but we are heading for Hobart and I saw your boat is from Hobart and wondered if I could ask you about what we should expect down there,’ she said. We squirmed. The port named on our stern that year was one of convenience – a long story. We told her we were from Sydney, and she looked disappointed. As we later learned, Pelagic was intending to sail straight past Sydney on her way to Hobart. ‘Why don’t you come aboard anyway?’ I suggested. It wasn’t something I often said. It’s not that I’m unfriendly, but some yachties can be hard to dislodge once they settle in for a chat, and we were on a schedule, due to meet two of our sons off the plane in Townsville. But she was exotic, a bird all the way from Alaska, and I was curious.

That was how it started for us and Pelagic. We brewed fresh coffee; Alex, who is good with small children, set Elias up in the marine beanbag on deck, and I began a conversation with Alisa which, though sporadic, is ongoing. When she and Elias made to leave, I pressed on her a pile of New Yorker magazines. Manna from heaven. The next time we met, in passing in the Great Sandy Straits (tucked between Fraser Island and the mainland), she brought me over a new translation of Anna Karenina, and a loaf of fresh bread.

We didn’t meet Mike that first morning at Horseshoe Bay. He was writing, Alisa said. Lucky for him, I remember thinking. A toddler on board, and the guy gets leave to write? She gave me their blog address, and I began to read. The guy was good, which seemed unjust considering he was a marine biologist by trade. It wasn’t until Pelagic diverted into Sydney harbour a few months later, over New Year, and he and Alex discovered a common hero in the British explorer and writer Wilfred Thesiger, that the pieces began to fall into place. Disguised as a jobbing scientist and budget cruising sailor, Mike is a shameless romantic adventurer. He’d laugh at that, and say the romance has worn pretty thin on this second voyage – the one that he and Alisa have just made across the Pacific on a bigger boat called Galactic – but I’d wager that it’s still his starting point. When he gave me the first draft of his book to read, the one he was sweating over in Horseshoe Bay and which he finished in Hobart, amidst the kind of turmoil that only a crazed man would consider conducive to thought, I revised my description of him again. He’s a natural born writer.

Writing the City

Sally Heath — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +1100

SALLY HEATH: How did you arrive at the tone you finally used in the book?

Peter Timms: As a newcomer, it was important that I didn’t come across as a know-all. Tasmanians are very sensitive about people from elsewhere presuming to encroach on their territory. So it was necessary always to adopt the voice of the interested, sympathetic outsider, opinionated but aware of sensitivities and deferential to the opinions of others with more experience of the city. This is why I based the book around interviews with local business people, artists, politicians and others. They gave me a springboard from which to launch my own observations. They also provide a range of voices, which gives the book more texture.

Kerryn Goldsworthy: I was inspired by a novel that arrived one day in a package of books for review. I have long forgotten the title but I remember the general idea of it vividly. It called itself a novel and was the story of a romance, but it was really what I’d call a curated relationship: it took the form of an exhibition catalogue, in which various artefacts and memorabilia from the relationship – theatre tickets, a jacket worn on a first date, a loaned book, a special wine glass – were photographed and appeared with gallery-type notes under them explaining their import, adding up to the whole story of what Paul Simon calls ‘the arc of a love affair’. It occurred to me that this would be a great way to do the Adelaide book: to choose iconic or numinous objects that seemed to resonate with meaning and to write a sort of meditative essay about each one, using it as a focus for different stories and ideas about the city.

Sophie Cunningham: Watching how Melbourne was being reduced by drought was a bit like watching it die of thirst. Then Black Saturday struck in early February 2009. Standing in my street on a 47-degree day, surrounded by a row of Victorian houses that had heated up like ovens, brought home to me that Melbourne was a city that had been built on European principles. It was obvious that its way of imagining itself was going to have to change if the city was going to survive the challenges of climate change and population growth over the next forty years. That terrible day became the opening of the book and once that decision was made I chose to run with the idea of Melbourne as a city ruled by weather, even if – or especially because – the joke that it always rained was so dated.

SALLY HEATH: What elements of the cities revealed themselves?

Matthew Condon: I used the opportunity in the writing to revisit many of the stories and myths I had heard and remembered from childhood. I deliberately drilled down into the Indigenous history of the city, and also looked in depth at the early settlement and its function as a penal colony. The aggression of Brisbane interested me, founded as it was on violence. I wanted to see if violence is in the DNA of a city; how that might have shaped, and continued to shape, the city’s inhabitants. My investigations revealed a plethora of eccentric, quixotic characters throughout the city’s history. One of the abiding themes of the book, however, is this disregard for history and the past and especially lessons learnt from the past.

Peter Timms: What most surprised me was the extent of disadvantage in Hobart. I’d read the statistics, but hadn’t really experienced it. One tends to stick to the areas one knows, which, in my case, were the relatively well-off suburbs of Sandy Bay, Battery Point, West Hobart and North Hobart. I just drove past the poorer areas without really taking much notice. Researching the book meant spending some time in these neighbourhoods, wandering around, going to garage sales and open houses, engaging people in conversation. It was an eye-opener.

Delia Falconer: I was struck very forcefully by historian Grace Karskens’ work on the make-up of the early English population of this city. I loved her description of how many convicts, unlike their Georgian captors, could be more accurately thought of as citizens of a pre-industrial age: many rural or working-class prisoners were steeped in pre-modern patterns of time and behaviour (a distrust of government, a cyclical and seasonal sense of time and consequent patterns of rest and work). This had never occurred to me before. Not only did Sydney’s Indigenous history long predate colonisation; the colonisers’ history (or histories) had deep roots before 1788. This captured an instinctive sense of antipathy I had always felt towards the snobbish European truism that we were (and still are) such a ‘young’ and callow city.

DELIA FALCONER: Another question for the writers. Was there anything you wanted not to write about? And how did you decide what to leave out?

Kerryn Goldsworthy: After giving it a lot of thought, I made a considered decision not to put any emphasis on the sociological aspects of Adelaide’s depressed outer northern suburbs, which was the crucible of the so-called Bodies in the Barrels serial murders and which is an ongoing problem in a post-industrial landscape – the whole city of Elizabeth, the centre of that region, was established in the first instance specifically as an industrial base in the 1950s. The main reason for that decision was that I think the people who live there get quite stigmatised enough without any help from me. And in any case it’s not really that kind of book. I have tried throughout to maintain an awareness of various social justice issues in Adelaide and how they get played out, and that’s woven into the different chapters in different ways.

Delia Falconer: One difficulty intrinsic to this project was that Sydney is such an international tourist destination, filled with icons that are recognised around the world. In a sense, the more these are photographed and celebrated, the less local meaning they hold. I had a very strong feeling that I didn’t want to spend too much time, if any, writing about the Harbour Bridge or Opera House, for example. My sense was that Sydney quite likes to hide itself behind these clichés, almost as a way of secreting away its inner life. And it was this inner life, beneath the facade, that I wanted to explore. This decision led to an interesting line of thought, which was that Sydneysiders’ relationship to the city’s natural beauty and easy access to leisure read differently from inside than outside. That is, while Sydney’s enjoyment of sun and surf is seen as mindless by those who don’t live here, it can have a quite spiritual dimension for those who do. And I realise I’ve also just answered my next question ...

DELIA FALCONER: Was there a particular ‘idea’ outsiders might have about your city that you were aware of, and wanted to confirm, deny or complicate?

Matthew Condon: The commonality of people’s remembrances of Brisbane, or their Brisbane, is how expatriates all lean towards this childhood Eden. It is a place that, at a distance, can I think be over-remembered. The vegetation is always lusher; the light always fantastic; the innocence overwhelming. There is something about Brisbane and the hold it takes on its children. It’s as if, for a moment, it offered perfection. And I think Brisbane-born people spend a lifetime trying to get back to that moment.

This is an abridged version of an article originally published by Meanjin http://meanjin.com.au/.

Ed Cowan's new book big news in UK too

Ed Cowan — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:08:53 +1100

Ed Cowan's just-released cricketing diary In the Firing Line is receiving well-deserved praise not just in Australia but also around the cricketing world. This article from the UK's Daily Telegraph continues the applause.

Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History

Jim Davidson — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:56:27 +1100

Congratulations to Jim Davidson who has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History for his book A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W K Hancock. The prize was awarded joint first place with Peter Stanley for Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny and Murder in the Great War (Pier 9).

Transit of Venus

Nick Lomb — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:34:41 +1100

'In 18th century science there was a landmark event that Captain James Cook was so eager to observe that he sailed around the world to catch a glimpse.'

Writing on Science

Peter C. Doherty — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:12:53 +1100

'The biggest news stories of the year -- the Queensland and Victorian floods, the Japanese tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown, the Carbon Tax -- all have science at their core.'

Peter Doherty and Stephen Pincock discuss the best Australian science writing of 2011.

Throwing Yourself in a Rip for Science

Rob Brander — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:06:30 +1100

'Finally, I reminded myself that I should 'relax and don't panic' and was amazed that this provided me with absolutely no comfort at all.'

Dr Rob Brander on the science of surviving a rip.

Retro

Adrian Franklin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +1100

The current enthusiasm for retro things is astonishing. It accounts for a massive part of the global internet market, just as it drives a global love affair with second-hand markets, charity shops and car-boot sales. While there were 115 342 objects described as ‘antiques’ at auction on eBay when I looked earlier this year, there were 630 244 items listed under ‘retro’ or its analogue, ‘vintage’ (Carter’s Guides define vintage as post-'50s objects, although I make allowances for fuzzy boundaries). We are seeing antiques shops disappear before our eyes and their premises taken over by twentieth-century emporia. Go to Fitzroy in Melbourne, Surry Hills in Sydney, or Notting Hill or Alfies Antiques Market in central London and see for yourself.

Some antiques dealers now make the switch before they go under. As it develops, we see its commercial side grow: there are now exhaustive op-shop guides to New York, London, Paris, Sydney and Melbourne; television has realised its popular appeal with a new suite of programming spanning its entire range, all obtaining top ratings; and there is a massive new manufacturing base built on continuing series of retro designs and reissues.

Of course, a lot of this is made in China, but the estate of Abram Games, the poster designer from the 1940s to '80s, now sells reissues, Arabia in Finland does the same with many of its choice vintage designs, as does Jobs the bespoke Swedish fabric designer/maker. In fact, one does not have to work the charity shops to find vintage Lucienne Day fabrics or Florence Broadhurst wallpapers. Most of the top furniture manufacturers have continued to make many of the designs we hunt down in top auction houses.

Objects with compelling histories of design and manufacture compare favourably to what is currently on sale new in shops. While there is a vibrant design market, where similar details of pedigree and provenance are craved, it is a fact that as we stopped being a manufacturing culture, the vast majority of things around us are produced overseas by people we do not know, in towns and regions we have never heard of, and under conditions of which we would probably be ashamed.

Adrian Franklin is the author of Retro: A guide to the mid-20th century design revival, published by NewSouth.

Transit of Venus

Nick Lomb — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +1100

Every so often, the planet Venus does something remarkable. Its orbit brings it to a point directly between the Sun and the Earth, where it appears to us as a black dot moving across the bright disc of the Sun. This transit of Venus is rare, occurring in pairs eight years apart and then not for more than a hundred years; it has fascinated astronomers for centuries.

Many people will recall the excitement of the transit of Venus on 8 June 2004, the first transit since 1882. Seeing Venus in front of the Sun for the first time in our lifetimes was a powerful experience, helping us to connect with the history and significance of this rare event, although viewing the 2004 transit was far easier than it had been for the adventurous astronomers of previous centuries.

The second of the pair of 21st-century transits of Venus is fast approaching. This transit, the last until the year 2117, will take place on 5 or 6 June 2012 (depending on your location) and people on most continents will have the opportunity to see all or at least part of the event.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, astronomers and explorers set out on long and dangerous journeys to faraway places in order to observe this prized celestial event, often enduring great hardships along the way. Famously, the English explorer Lieutenant James Cook sailed to Tahiti for the transit of 3 June 1769, a voyage that led to his mapping the whole of New Zealand and the east coast of Australia and claiming these lands for the British Crown.

The attempts to observe those transits of past centuries were some of the earliest scientific expeditions. They led, for the first time, to international cooperation between scientists in planning and assisting observations, even in some cases while their countries of origin were at war.

Why all the fuss?

During a transit, Venus can come as close as 38 million kilometres to Earth, closer than any other planet. What’s more, at those times the planet is clearly visible in silhouette, with the Sun’s bright surface providing a sort of ruler or protractor to allow measurement of the very small angles involved in the distance determinations.

Astronomers from many places, supported by their countries mainly for reasons of national prestige, eagerly observed the transits of 1761, 1769 and 1874 and, with somewhat diminished enthusiasm, the transit of 1882. The results of their huge efforts pinned down the value of the Sun’s distance to within a few million kilometres of the present-day accepted value.

One of the best-known comments about the transit of Venus was made in August 1882 by US Naval Observatory astronomer William Harkness, who observed the 1874 transit from Hobart, Australia. As we approach the 2012 transit of Venus, we too might like to think about what the world will be like for our descendants when the next transit takes place in the northern winter and southern summer of 2117.

'Transits of Venus usually occur in pairs; the two transits of a pair being separated by only eight years, but between the nearest transits of consecutive pairs more than a century elapses. We are now on the eve of the second transit of a pair, after which there will be no other till the twenty-first century of our era. When the last transit season occurred the intellectual world was awakening from the slumber of ages, and that wondrous scientific activity which has led to our present advanced knowledge was just beginning. What will be the state of science when the next transit season arrives God only knows. Not even our children’s children will live to take part in the astronomy of that day. As for ourselves, we have to do with the present ...'

This is an edited excerpt from Transit of Venus: 1631 to the present by Nick Lomb, published by NewSouth in partnership with Powerhouse Museum.

In the Firing Line

Ed Cowan — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +1100

I often wonder what my childhood would have been like if I did not have older brothers. Had I not, I doubt I would be a professional cricketer. I can’t point to the moment in time that the game I now call my job took a firm grip on my imagination and is yet to let it go. If I was an untalented junior, would I still have held the same love for the game as I did growing up? Perhaps other interests would have climbed like a vine and strangled the enjoyment I derived from standing in the unrelenting Sydney sun for endless hours, waiting for my turn to bat.

In those days, cricket was nothing more than family time for me. We would play for hours every evening before dinner, often in fading light – Dad always hovering over the brotherly contests in the doorway, handing out advice, but more importantly being the fourth kid and usually causing more trouble than the rest of us combined. The pitch a cobbled brick verandah, the stumps a kitchen chair that had to be replaced by meal time. And the pitch was thin and long; there was no room for fielders, just a wicket keeper. Lucky there were only three of us. The threat of broken windows and the associated perpetual debt ensured not many attacking shots were played. There is no doubt this influenced my development into what is affectionately known as an ‘accumulator’ of runs. Perhaps if I was a country boy, I would have been more of an attacker and an Indian Premier League millionaire. As I developed, the game started to consume every waking thought.

Well over 20 years later, it still does. I often lie awake at night during cricket season, either dreaming of next day’s glory or fretting over failure. Most jobs can be left in the office, but it seems, rarely this one. When it does become a little overshadowing, your myopic view can taint your memory of what is motivating you to get out of bed. When you are playing well though, you feel like an amateur in the park, simply playing as a kid would, without a single thought in your head, not a trouble in the world. It is the potential of these days that encourages you to turn up and face your fears.

What then happens when the light finally dims on your career? All you have known ceases to exist in a matter of moments. You are thrust from expert to novice, stepping into the ‘real’ world with no experience and perhaps a few grains of knowledge. That is the risk of being a professional sportsman. If you don’t make it big, you don’t really make it at all. Retiring can be like putting on an invisibility cloak. Perhaps it would have been easier not to have fallen in love in the first place.

Ed Cowan is the author of In the Firing Line: Diary of a season, published by NewSouth.

The Poetics of Anthology

Lisa Gorton — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +1100

I came across poetry first in anthologies – various, outmoded, inherited anthologies among my parents’ books. I still remember copying Charles Harpur’s ‘A Mid-Summer Noon in the Australian Forest’ into the journal I kept when I was seven. Oddly, when I read it then, what it called to mind was not the Australian forest but the suburb where I lived: vacant, well-tended; terrain marked out always by the sound of someone mowing – mowing always out of sight.

Still, the word ‘broods’ conjures for me that poem and, through the poem, that stopped world where, walking the streets on a hot day in summer, one seemed to enter into unformulated existence – time itself.

Not a bird disturbs the air,

There is quiet everywhere;

Over plains and over woods

What a mighty stillness broods.

It was perhaps the half-rhyme of ‘woods’ and ‘broods’ which made the poem so compelling: ‘woods’ sounding softly, like an echo returning before the first word is said.

Reading is by its nature wayward and idiosyncratic, and every poet is secretly an anthologist. That is one reason poets argue every time a new anthology comes out. Every poet has a collection of poems – often unlikely, even unpredictable – which have at one time, and perhaps because of one word, possessed the imagination. These together make a history of experience – useless to try to separate the experience of reading from the experience of fact.

What an anthologist wants is probably something like what a poet wants: to make, out of that history of experience, some experience safe from history. If anthologies are, by the nature of reading, individual – the word from the Greek, ‘flower-gathering’ – still they lend poems the life of a monument.

I never once imagined Charles Harpur. I knew in only the most theoretical way that people wrote poems. If I had imagined Harpur, I would have imagined someone who had walked through the door of the poem into the world behind the book – that world behind all books, where images are facts. Harpur is not a poet I read often now. Still his poem, because it wove itself into my early memories, brings home the strangeness as well as the pleasure of having poems in the same anthology, more than a thousand pages later. When I was copying that Harpur poem into my journal, my farthest ambition was to have two or three poems in some anthology that would last.

Some of Lisa Gorton’s poems, along with Charles Harpur’s ‘A Mid-Summer Noon in the Australian Forest’, grace the pages of Australian Poetry Since 1788 edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray, published by UNSW Press.

Stories from Science

Peter C. Doherty — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +1100

While some have been arguing that books will ultimately disappear, this will clearly not be the case for science. Whether published electronically or as hard copy there is, I think, a substantial market for readable, interesting and comprehensive treatments of serious, science-based issues. While TV nature spectaculars like those presented by Richard Attenborough can be very successful at getting visual messages about science across, there’s still no substitute for a book that allows us to go back over the discussion at any place and time.

Good, well-researched books that look at particular issues in depth, and anthologies of science writing, are more and more important. The great thing about a book is that it endures and, even if it is long out of print, can turn up in second-hand bookstores, on a side table in a rented beach house, or be found by a young person browsing the shelves at home or in a library.

One other thing we clearly need is more good science stories and science-based fiction for children and adolescents. I wish I had a talent for fiction, and would suggest to any young scientist who can write that this is a very worthwhile goal.

The scientific literature is vast, but where (excluding science fiction) is the contemporary, imaginative literature of science? Setting aside the ‘end of the world as we know it’ stuff, the various mystery writers who have a forensic pathologist as a central character, Allegra Goodman’s Intuition (about a biomedical research lab) and the terminally despicable Nobel Prize-winning physicist in Ian MacEwan’s Solar, intelligent fiction that features real science and scientists who are believable human beings seems to have declined since the days of Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley and C.P. Snow. There was Michael Crichton, but he made a living out of being hostile to contemporary science. Great science is a fundamentally honourable activity that transforms our reality and is about curiosity, innovation, discovery and insight.

Are scientists themselves uninteresting?

While some can come across as pitiless bores when put in front of a broader audience, others are wonderful communicators and intriguing people to boot. In the United States, at least, there is a continuing fascination with the flamboyant personality of the late Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist who was in every way more appealing than MacEwan’s imagined monster.

A few of the leading science journals, such as Neurology and Nature, now run short fiction pieces, a bit like one or two of the more fanciful pieces included here. Maybe we need annual prizes for the best science-based short story and novel. Vignettes can be fascinating, whether nonfiction or fiction, and collecting those pieces of writing in an anthology is a good place to start.

This is an edited extract from Peter C. Doherty’s Foreword to The Best Australian Science Writing 2011, published by NewSouth.

Sustainable Celebration

Rosemary Stanton — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +1100

At this time of the year, there are lots of things we can do to make shopping and eating simpler, healthier, more enjoyable and more sustainable.

Yearly food waste in Australia is estimated at about 360 kg/person, or over 930 kg/household. It costs too – about $5.2 billion/year, including $1.1 billion of discarded fruit and vegetables.

Food wastage peaks at holiday times. Most people buy too much, eat and drink too much and also fill the garbage can to capacity. It’s a good time to take stock of our waste as well as our ‘waist’.

I try to choose my indulgences by quality rather than quantity – fresh raspberries, mangoes, home-made ice cream, a glass of good wine can all make my mouth water. The fact that the fruits and the wine are expensive and that it takes time to make my special ice cream restrict my indulgence but probably increase my pleasure in enjoying a true treat.

Whatever our personal food desires, careful choices for quantity and quality make good sense from an economical, health or environmental perspective.

It’s also important to store foods safely. Food that has gone ‘off’ is a total waste all round.

Most foods sitting on a buffet table at room temperature in the Australian summer will pose a hazard for later use, so make sure someone has the task of putting hot foods into the oven to stay hot (if second helpings are likely to be needed) and placing cold foods into the fridge as soon as everyone is served. After the meal, check the leftovers, work out what can be used over the next day or so and make use of the freezer for later use.

Among animal foods, some are better environmental buys than others. Depending on the area where animals are raised or caught, there are exceptions, but in general poultry, pigs and selected seafood create a lower carbon footprint than methane producing animals. If you really want beef or lamb, try to find meat from free range grass-fed animals rather than those from feedlots. If your butcher has no idea where the meat comes from, find another butcher. If animal welfare is an issue (and it is for me), I try to choose foods from organic farms.

For fruits and vegetables, choose those in season. That makes summer a happy time for Australians as we have berries, a range of stone fruits, mangoes, grapes, asparagus, avocadoes and sweet red capsicums. Locally grown vegetables are an obviously good choice, with the ultimate for taste and sustainability being those from your own backyard or a nearby farmer’s market.

Dr Rosemary Stanton is the author of The Choice Guide to Food published by CHOICE Books.

'Sydney' Wins

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:51:00 +1100

Congratulations to Delia Falconer for winning the CAL Waverley NIB award for Sydney. Her first literary prize, and much deserved.

Launching the Revolution

Laurie Oakes — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1100

Bob Hawke used to have a rule. He wouldn’t launch a book unless his name was in the index. That’s why the index to David Marr’s 1980 biography of Garfield Barwick has the following entry: Hawke, R.J., no mention of.

I regard the Hawke approach as eminently sensible, so the first thing I did when I got my hands on Come the Revolution was check the index. My name is there, so I’m here. But I have to say, the first reference I looked up caused me some distress.

It’s the story of how, when Alex and I shared a flat in Paddington in 1964, the legendary Mount Isa strike leader Pat Mackie turned up on our doorstep, and we had to first hide him from the rozzers and then smuggle him out under their noses so he could get back to Queensland with money he’d raised for the strike fund.

I’m quoted in the book as saying: “The Mackie episode was an eye-opener for me, but it was pretty much par for the course for Alex. I blame him and the Mackie incident for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation opening a file on me.”

The thing is ... after I said that a few years ago, I thought it would be interesting to see my ASIO file. So I applied for it, as you’re entitled to do after a certain period of time.

What I was sent was so disturbing that I find it difficult to talk about, even now.

It was a letter saying that there was NO ASIO file on me and never had been.

You can imagine the humiliation.

It’s not just the Mackie thing.

When Alex became a Trotskyist leader in Britain and was doing his utmost to bring about the workers’ revolution, I used to try to catch up with him for a feed or a drink whenever I passed through London.

And there always seemed to be a little man in an overcoat, hat pulled down, sitting in a dark corner, pretending not to watch us.

But still no security file. It doesn’t say much for MI5/ASIO liaison, does it?

Anyway, I’ll put my embarrassment to one side and take comfort from the knowledge that there’s not a security file on Alex, either. There’s a filing CABINET. And I deserve at least a tiny bit of credit for that.

Because, as he says in Come the Revolution, I gave him his introduction to the anti-Vietnam war movement on the university campuses, and put him in contact with people who wore duffle coats and sang doleful folk songs. It was an important part of his political journey. “The war,” he writes, “was the watershed of my life.”

This is, of course, a very political book. It deals with the author’s political development. It tells the story of a political movement – including the results of Alex’s own investigation of the murder of Leon Trotsky. It details the activities and ultimate destruction of a radical political party. And it contains a strong political message.

But it’s also a book about journalism. A terrific book about journalism, in fact. Josh Rosner, a teaching fellow in journalism and communications at Canberra University, who reviewed it in The Canberra Times, wrote that Come the Revolution would be required reading for his first-year journalism students in 2012.

And, I’m telling you, if it doesn’t get them fired up about the career path they’ve chosen, nothing will.

Here’s a bloke who started out at 14 getting printer's ink and glue smeared on his genitals at The Townsville Bulletin and went on to cover some of the most notorious murders in Sydney in the 1960s, was in Canberra when Sir Robert Menzies retired after 17 years as prime minister and asked the first question at Ming’s final press conference, moved to Fleet Street and became part of the Sunday Times 'Insight' team for several of its most famous investigations including the Kim Philby spy scandal, and made a ground-breaking TV documentary on Idi Amin that involved conning the dictator into an interview that helped to expose him for the monster he was.

They’re just the headlines of an illustrious journalistic career.

Two anecdotes from the book ...

When the documentary team was safely back in England after the Idi Amin interview, the cameraman was asked what had been the scariest moment in Uganda. He replied that it was when Amin was chatting to the producer while the camera and lights were being set up. “I saw out of the corner of my eye Alex grabbing documents from Amin’s desk and shoving them into his pocket,” the cameraman said. “I thought we’d never get out of there alive.”

And I love the question Alex asked at that final Menzies press conference. It’s so typically Mitchell – which is to say, it’s not the obvious question. “Sir Robert, you have told us about your achievements,” Alex said, after the retiring PM’s opening statement. “But what about the failures?” To which Menzies replied instantly: “There weren’t any.”

What Alex’s politics and journalism have in common is passion. A lot of us in the craft stand back, adhering to the view that journalists should maintain a certain detachment. Others shun the idea of detachment, and believe they should use journalism to try to change things for the better.

The attitude of detachment was not a comfortable fit for Alex. He felt too strongly about a whole lot of things for that. And eventually he lost faith in the ability of mainstream journalism to bring about the kind of changes he believed necessary. So – for 16 years – he opted for a more direct approach alongside people like Vanessa and Corin Redgrave in Gerry Healy’s Workers’ Revolutionary Party – editing its newspaper being one of his duties.

But when he returned to mainstream journalism (he’d call it capitalist journalism) and to Australia, in 1986, it was as though he’d never been away from either.

Come the Revolution got me excited about journalism all over again. As I read the description of the printing process at the old Townsville Bulletin I found the smell of hot metal that I loved so much when I first joined Sydney's Daily Mirror 47 years ago was back in my nostrils. I could hear the clatter of the linotype machines, the roar of the presses.

When I read the tips Alex got as a young journalist from old pros, it was déjà vu ... because some of the same old pros mentored me.

“Give them the facts and keep yourself out of it.” And: “Put just two or three facts in every sentence. No more. Otherwise the fuckers won’t know what the hell you’re writing about.” And: “Pretend that a reader is sitting in front of you on the other side of the typewriter and asking you the question, ‘What’s this story about?’”

And then there’s the way two great expat Australian investigative journalists – Phillip Knightley and Murray Sayle – taught Alex to look at ordinary, everyday reporting as Public Service Journalism when he first got to Fleet Street. They called it PSJ.

Alex writes: “PSJ is the staple diet of the reporting class ... It basically means telling the readers what is really going on, whether it is local, national or international news. PSJ is the sworn enemy of lazy rewrites of press releases and rescripted quotations from politicians and business leaders. To effectively conduct PSJ you need to be inquisitive, ask hard questions and go the extra distance in researching an article because that is your responsibility to the readers.”

Or, as Sayle once put it, according to Alex, “They don’t want bullshit; they want to know what’s going on”.

If every young journalist digested that, and if all reporters saw their job as a public service, the standard of reporting in this country would shoot up. And the decline in the public’s trust in journalists and journalism might be arrested.

The head of The Sunday Times 'Insight' team, another Australian, Bruce Page, didn’t think investigative journalism should be a special category. Alex quotes him as saying: “Every story must be tested for origin, bias and coherence, and the evidence behind it critically analysed. The stream of news only stays hygienic if the investigative process is continuously available.”

These were great people to learn from. They are the kind of lessons we might wish were put into practice more often in today’s journalism.

Alex left Australia bound for the UK on the P&O liner Oronsay immediately after the anti-Labor landslide in the 1966 Vietnam War election. This was partly because he was depressed about Australian politics. But love of journalism was still by far the bigger consideration for him.

He writes: “I had spent hours in the parliamentary library reading the British newspapers and was captivated by the quality of the writing and the scope and depth of the coverage.” He was drawn towards Fleet Street because it was the Mecca of world journalism.

And what he tells us in the book about his experiences there, the people he met and the stories he was involved in show why that was so.

I first met Alex when I joined the Daily Mirror straight out of Sydney University. We were pretty much the same age, but he’d been in journalism a few years by then — on the Townsville Bulletin and the Mount Isa Mail, before Rupert Murdoch brought him to Sydney. He was already a bit of a legend as a prankster and a player as well as a journalistic up-and-comer.

The flat Alex and I shared for a time was the bottom half of an old terrace house in Suffolk Street, Paddington, that we dubbed Suffolk Manor. When we first looked at the place, we found we couldn’t rake up the deposit between us so we repaired to the Journalists’ Club to drown our sorrows, and idly started putting coins through a poker machine.

Alex hit the jackpot, and quick as a flash we were back at the real estate office, signing the lease, and paying the deposit in coins as the agent explained that the owner of the property strongly disapproved of gambling and drinking. We, of course, assured him that we shared those sentiments.

A result of living with Alex for a while was that I saw the deeply serious side of him which, I think, was largely hidden from most of his colleagues at the time.

They would have been surprised when he was spotted taking part in an antiwar march. He writes, in fact, about being rebuked on the grounds that “Journos don’t go on marches – we report them”.

Sometimes, when liquor had been consumed at The Manor, a rare event of course, he would talk about things that made him angry. And he would tell some of the stories that are in Come the Revolution about the treatment of indigenous Australians in North Queensland, and the behaviour of police, and union bosses who sold out the workers.

So when he eventually cut short a brilliant career in the British media to throw in his lot with the Trots I was probably not as surprised as some who knew him.

What I didn’t understand until I read this book, though, was how Alex’s experiences as a journalist gradually shaped his politics. The injustices he saw, the things he learned, the people he met, pushed him in one direction.

Until he abandoned mainstream journalism altogether to become a political journalist, in the true sense, as editor of the Trotskyist newspaper The Workers’ Press, later renamed News Line.

As he explains it in the book: “It seemed to me that if you wanted to be taken seriously, then it was time to do something serious. There was little point in talking about socialism while selling your talent to Lord Thomson of Fleet or Lord Bernstein.”

The section of the book on Alex’s life as a Trot, like the stuff on journalism, is a rattling good read, with a cast of characters that includes Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi.

The plotting and intrigue inside the Workers’ Revolutionary Party puts the shenanigans of the Labor Party’s NSW Right in the shade.

It culminated in the leader, Gerry Healy, being framed in a sex scandal (Alex believes security agencies were involved), and his opponents flogging off everything in sight, including property on loan from Vanessa Redgrave, and taking off with the cash.

Alex covers the story in the book like the terrific journalist he is.

After the WRP imploded, he and his partner, Judith, boarded a plane for Australia—which was good news for journalism in this country.

As Alex puts it, he dismantled his previous political life and rebuilt his career in the mainstream media, writing about crime, corruption, cops – anything that fell into the category of Public Service Journalism – and eventually he became the Sydney Sun-Herald’s state political editor.

But if you think the political fire in Alex Mitchell’s belly has gone out, you could not be more wrong. "As capitalism repeats its failures," he says, "and the planet suffers more irreversible damage from corporate exploitation, people’s attitudes will change. Surely then the revolution will come."

And his final comment on journalism is sobering.

"I had worked both sides of the street and appreciated the advantages and disadvantages of the capitalist press and the socialist press," he says. "Neither are good places for freethinkers, democrats or individualists."

It’s now my pleasure to smash the champagne bottle across the bows of Come the Revolution ... and declare it launched.

Poetry at the art gallery

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:48:04 +1100

'Big books are an affront to the internet.'

Sums up the launch of this magnificent beast of a book nicely. Captured on Storify.

The Flight Attendant's Shoe

Katrina Schlunke — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1100

I’ve just returned from a long flight from Frankfurt sitting in what I think is recognised as the worst seat in economy. That’s the aisle seat number 56D where the video reboot box takes up half of one’s ‘leg room’. It’s right next to the preparation area so that every movement of the trolley and every call from demanding passengers involve movement past that seat. And even in the pretend night when the curtains are drawn against the light in the prep area, each movement into the aisle involves a sudden blink of bright light onto that same seat.

But this is also the seat where one gains a great appreciation for the labour of the flight attendant world. While we ‘sleep’, they sort out problems. A German lady seems to be having strange problems with her video monitor, and although she is four rows behind me, you can feel her becoming calmer the moment the attendants begin to speak her language and make what sound like offers of another hot chocolate. It’s that classic soothing attendant tone which they must teach at flight attendant school: somewhere between matron and mother, with a conviviality that can turn to command. Of all the service professions this is surely the one that embodies the deep complexities of just what service as labour might mean.

Prudence Black never forgets that the world of airline fashion is animated and articulated through these labouring bodies and she gets us to rethink just how gender, bodies, clothes, service, modernity, post-modernity and technology come to be known to us through what we wear and how wear it. We come to appreciate the cultural work that the hostess uniform does as something that reflects the world around it but also constitutes it. In each turn from navy to orange, from wool to cotton nylon, from maxi to mini, we feel, as well as read, the national and corporate dreams of aviation innovation secured, made safe and sold to passengers via the uniform. It is the uniform that lets science become a service.

At the same time the flight attendant’s uniform becomes an act of translation. It is the uniform that reassures us that being in the air is not an unnatural act but something safe, domestic, sexy, and even banal.

This book also gave me an unexpectedly intimate portrait of the national imaginings of Australia from post-war until now. Through the uniform at work in the extreme modernity of the airplane you can see anew the push and pull of Australian culture. The very roots of Qantas being in Queensland and the Northern Territory signals that the deity that arose from our desert was this very modern god, the airplane. But in an environment that demanded that we live with modern technology, the airplane quickly became a very ordinary work-horse. Quite simply the most practical way to cover the natural distances and scale that Australia threw up was to incorporate the airplane into the way we saw ourselves as at home in the Australian environment.

With that historical imagining you may see why Qantas advertisements work so well upon us still. The spirit of Australia is still invested in moving over rather than through the land. Moving over not seeming to require the thoughtfulness and Indigenous permission that moving through inspires. Therefore the uniforms of those that move within that above-ground space are marked as small, acute performances of ideal nationalism in transit.

And you can’t help but read the exuberance of the Australian national project off the sheen of these changing uniforms. In each of them – the jet-setting green with Flash Gordon red, the cool Aqua and then the breakout Coral (let’s just call it bright orange) of the post 1968 world – there is some flavour of Australia’s take on the world. Was the sophisticated but practical cosmopolitanism of the Pucci uniform a response to the Whitlam moment, or did people vote for Whitlam because he was the most Pucci-like candidate? And can’t you see Hawke as just the kind of guy who would wear a kangarooed-up Yves St Laurent outfit? And now Morrissey with his thoughtful prints and who knows what next?

The Flight Attendant's Shoe also shows us that the uniform is a wonderful way of seeing gender at work. I loved the constant way in which every uniform was adapted by its wearers to both the conditions of work and the fashions of the time. We learn from this book that female flight attendants in particular had to carry the inequalities of their position represented in the paradox of having a ‘dream job’, while being paid so much less than men doing the same work. And they had to dress in uniforms that stretched between the practical and the chic – all the while managing the double and triple standards of being figures of desire and comfort, modern and maternal and safety-conscious, and consumerist and savvy. Can any uniform have held so many contradictions?

We know it’s quicker to get to London now; it takes 22 hours rather than 226, as it used to. These leaps along the time scale have been accompanied by ideas about how the interior of the plane should be imagined. Was it a select business club that required amenable hostesses and jovial stewards? Was it a frightening technological juggernaut requiring a sense of domestic security and medical back-up? Or is it a bus that needs conductors and facilitators who are terrorist-savvy? In each of these shifts, what was worn in the airspace told its story about who we are, as men and women, as corporate consumers and as national citizens.

This is an edited version of Katrina Schlunke's launch speech for The Flight Attendant's Shoe published by NewSouth, delivered at the Women's Club Sydney, standing below a lovely portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, to an audience of colleagues, family, friends and many current and former air hostesses, who were the best-groomed people in the room.

Getting Published

Grahame Bond — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1100

So how do you get a book published? Many things can happen twixt the writing and holding a copy of the printed book in your hands. It’s really not easy – first there is the lengthy process of writing the material and then there’s the even longer process of finding an outlet.

I began my quest almost four years ago. For me the most obvious partner in the exercise had to be good old Aunty ABC with whom I’d shared such a long history. But sadly, ABC Books no longer existed and the new distributors showed little interest in the project, so I approached a Melbourne publisher. Sounding enthusiastic on the phone, she suggested that I send 50 pages of excerpts, promising that she would get back with a decision post-haste. Being an old-fashioned soul, I did the honourable thing and waited for her reply; after nine months of silence, I gave up.

By now I was feeling a little insecure and a wee bit gun-shy, but I thought third time lucky, and contacted another publisher. It was only a short time later that I received an effusive e-mail exclaiming how much the publisher had enjoyed my stories and couldn’t wait to read more.

I replied that I was thrilled to get such positive feedback after my years in the wilderness. Almost immediately she emailed again, apologising for ‘jumping the gun’: she had pitched the book to her sales and marketing team who weren’t so keen. She explained that her youthful team weren’t around for Aunty Jack, and had suggested to her that a lot of the buyers stocking shelves in bookshops and producing radio and television shows may not have heard of me either. She did, however, soften the blow by suggesting that when the book was released she would certainly buy a copy. In reply, I generously offered her a 10 per cent discount.

It was April 2011 before I dared air my wares again. This time I contacted a publisher that I’d met socially. Her name was Phillipa McGuinness and she was with NewSouth Publishing. I explained how I’d almost given up on the book and was now using the material for a one-man show. Much to my delight, after reading my excerpts and getting feedback from others within her company, Phillipa came back with an offer to publish. Obviously NewSouth Publishing had seniors working in their sales and marketing department.

I immediately went into overdrive and delivered the final manuscript in record time. Things moved quickly and by September of the same year I received the final printed copy of the book.

Publishing doesn’t have to be a nightmare, but to succeed you have to be incredibly persistent and very resilient to rejection; but more importantly you need self-belief and confidence in your writing. If you’re lucky, you may connect with a publisher who can recognise a good story and will be brave enough not to be swayed by fashion or fluctuating marketing trends. I was blessed: it only took me three years to find an interested party … and in the scheme of things for a first timer, that’s a record.

Grahame Bond is the author of Jack of all Trades, Mistress of One, published by NewSouth.

What I Think About When I Think About Sex

Rob Brooks — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1100

The Victorian era (1837–1901) delivered explosive progress in technology and agriculture, transcendent changes in art and literature, and profound growth in rational and progressive thought. Important foundations of modern utilitarianism, feminism, socialism, and democracy were laid in Victorian England. And Charles Darwin’s great works on evolution forever changed human understanding of what it means to be alive. Nonetheless it is not a time that is known for an equally freethinking and liberated attitude to sex.

Today, Queen Vic and the time of her reign evoke stultifying prudishness. Biology has been lugging Victorian baggage for the last 150 years, only recently entering its own sexual revolution. While Darwin’s books transformed scientific thinking about reproduction, the stuffiness with which his fellow gentlemen naturalists thought about sex lingers today, distorting the ways in which people understand love, sex and reproduction.

The euphemistic view that sex is a necessary act that happens for the ‘perpetuation of the species’ prevails in scientific papers and nature documentaries alike. Elsewhere, we wallow in the sanitised view that sex is a happy and co-operative event, best discussed discreetly, seen in soft-focus and not too close up.

But for most animals, mating involves one part co-operation and several parts exploitation. Consider the various plant bugs and bedbugs in which the male inserts his hypodermic penis straight through the female’s body wall during mating, inflicting great trauma on her. Or the male spiders for whom a successful date involves becoming his mate’s dinner. What is good for the goose is very seldom good for the gander.

Compared with most of the animal kingdom, human mating is remarkably co-operative and mutually satisfying, most of the time. Human families are a true marvel of nature, rife with co-operation. But they are always stalked by the conflicting interests of the two partners.

In Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How evolution has shaped the modern world I explore some of the many insights which modern evolutionary biology provides to illuminate our modern lives. One such insight, and the reason that affairs of the heart fascinate us so wickedly, is sexual conflict; the idea that even a mommy and daddy who love each other very much can be in a perpetual tug-of-war between co-operation and conflict.

Intriguingly, in recent decades, as biologists have been waking up to sexual conflict, economists have enjoyed a similar epiphany. Until recently, economists modeling household decision-making always assumed that couples work together to maximise their combined benefits.

Adrienne Germain, the inspirational head of the International Women’s Health Coalition, recalls how in the 1970s, as a young sociologist working on family planning and development programs, she struggled to get economists to incorporate the differences in interests between men and women within households in their models. From her fieldwork in places like Peru, Germain knew that ‘every household has two decision-makers, not one’. It took a young field sociologist to persuade the best economic minds that ‘household decisions are a negotiation’.

Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen coined the wonderful expression ‘co-operative conflicts’ to describe the complex push and pull at the heart of even our most loving relationships. The economic understanding of co-operative conflicts quite literally changed the world. Development agencies now know that educating, empowering and extending credit to women, particularly mothers, generates the most effective improvements in the lives of families and the communities where those families live.

But economics can only take us so far. The embryonic science of evolutionary economics is making important steps toward understanding the links between our evolved biology and our economic behaviour. Sex, Genes & Rock 'n' Roll repeatedly illustrates how evolution generates the tension between co-operation and conflict, both biological and economic.

Understanding sexual conflict can help societies mitigate the damage when love or lust goes wrong: from spiteful divorces to sexual harassment. But we can achieve so much more when we understand that conflicts colour even our most loving and apparently harmonious relationships, and that partners can be in furious co-operative agreement and simultaneously have conflicting agendas.

I argue that a mature grasp of sexual conflict and evolution can help us to understand why educating girls is the most effective way of slowing population growth and curing poverty, why polygynous societies suffer such enormous violence, why marriages last longest in societies like the Inuit that inhabit harsh environments, why there is no such thing as the ideal family, why societies are better off when women have cheap and safe access to contraception and abortion, why rock stars and sportsmen are so obnoxiously promiscuous, and why we erupt in indignation at both the stars and the women with whom they dally.

Rob Brooks is the author of Sex, Genres & Rock 'n' Roll: How evolution has shaped the modern world, published by NewSouth.

Walking Melbourne

Sophie Cunningham — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1100

One of the biggest challenges of writing about your own city is having to overcome a sense of familiarity. While I wouldn’t go so far as to repeat the notion that it breeds contempt, familiarity certainly makes it hard to see clearly. By see I mean notice the things about a place that are particular to it, as opposed to the memories or emotions that are simply common to growing up in any city in Australia.

So, the first thing I did when I accepted the challenge of writing about Melbourne was to start walking, or cycling to places I’d usually drive. I made myself slow down. I started to take photos of the most incidental details. And then, when I got home I’d go to Google, or to my bookshelf, or the library, and read up a bit. So, for example, if I walked past the Edinburgh Gardens and saw some old guys playing boule, rather than just being vaguely enchanted, I’d write notes about the time I used to play that game with a friend some 25 years ago. Then I’d go to my book on Fitzroy’s history in the hope of finding out more about the history of that game in the area. I’d search for any recent articles on the game as it's played in Melbourne. And so on. Not all of this detail made it into the book of course, but it was an essential part of making myself look around with what I came to call a ‘tourist’s eye’.

This all put me in good stead for conducting walking tours as a part of this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival. As did the fact that I’m a walking tour fan and tend to take them whenever I travel. (I’ve walked on local tours through downtown Los Angeles, the backstreets of Atlanta, through Beat territory in San Francisco and markets in Bali. I’ve also attempted to treat my family as if I was a tour guide in New York, only to become frustrated by the fact they’d wander off during key moments in my commentary.) For all these reasons you would have thought walking around Melbourne’s CBD would be a breeze. It was not. My fatal error was to ask a group of friends to do a mock tour with me a couple of weeks before MWF began.

My friends diligently met me early one Sunday morning on the Parliament House steps – well, they tried, but there was a protest being held and we weren’t allowed onto them. This was the first inkling I had that things might not go to plan. We hovered by some traffic lights at the top end of Bourke Street and I tentatively began my spiel; but there’s nothing like standing in front of old friends and making pronouncements about the city they’ve lived in as long as you have to make you feel like a right tosser. I lost my nerve and my voice trailed off in a querulous fashion. Then we trooped off to the second point on the tour, a café in Myers Place to find it closed. At Treasury Place (taken off the final itinerary) one friend asked if I’d known the architect of the main building had been nineteen. I had not. My friend then mentioned that he’d written his thesis on the Treasury and the massive reserves of gold kept there during the gold rush. I gave up. ‘Why don’t you tell us,’ I said, ‘about the Treasury Building?’ He did.

While I found the experience of leading tours less stressful once I was doing them for real, this was, in fact, a recurring theme: everyone on the tours I took of Melbourne knew more than me – if not about all the topics I covered, certainly about very particular places and aspects of our history. I started to incorporate things people told me into the tour, or would simply step back and let people on the tour tell the group what they knew. No one seemed to mind. In fact it seemed to go better the more we just all chatted in a loud and public way as we stood in front of various destinations I’d chosen. Because that’s the thing about cities, we all have our own sets of experiences and memory.

These are particularly circumscribed by our age – someone who was a teenager in Melbourne in the '50s or '60s would have experienced the city very differently to my experiences of the '70s (they also would have been at the massive Seekers concert at the Myer Music Bowl in 1967). And this was what I most enjoyed about getting responses to the book, and of doing the walking tours: the chance to share our stories.

It’s why I’m planning to do another series of walks in the not-so-distant future, and not just around the CBD.

Sophie Cunningham is the author of Melbourne, published by NewSouth.

Gone Viral

Frank Bowden — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1100

Members of my professional tribe – infectious diseases physicians – are celebrated for their politeness, patience and gentility. They are known to be approachable and conciliatory in the sometimes-hostile hospital environment. These positive qualities, I am afraid to say, may also be among our greatest weaknesses – and they could be putting our patients at risk.

In Gone Viral, the germs that share our lives I look at 15 micro-organisms that have shaped the face of humanity over the last 100 years. One of them, HIV, has been established in humans for just over 30 years, but has become one of the worst epidemic infections of modern times. Another, SARS, appeared suddenly in 2003, scared the pants off the general population (and the medical profession) by killing around 10% of those infected, but then unexpectedly disappeared from the face of the earth. Even though nearly 200 Australians died, the swine flu pandemic of 2009 was not as severe as people originally feared, but it gave us a chance to see how the health system would react to a global health crisis.

It is understandable (and indeed appropriate) that these infections attract popular attention, but I have also tried to highlight a number of relatively neglected infections that, despite their unglamorous names and lack of hype, nevertheless cause substantial pain, suffering and death throughout the world. Take the humble garden-variety Golden Staph – a.k.a. Staphylococcus aureus – for example.

If you have been unfortunate enough to spend time in an emergency department waiting room you may have observed that the pale, sweaty, middle-aged man with his hand pressed to the centre of his chest has been taken straight through the doors to the back of the department – ahead of you. Because the triage nurse has a high suspicion that the man is having a heart attack, she follows an internationally accepted protocol, based on the premise that ‘time means heart muscle’ – the sooner the diagnosis is confirmed and the patient is taken to the coronary catheter laboratory where the blocked artery is opened up, the more likely the patient is to survive and to be left with minimal damage to the heart. Had you been sitting in the waiting room with a temperature of 39 degrees, shivering uncontrollably and brewing a staphylococcal infection in your blood, you would be unlikely to receive such an urgent welcome to the resuscitation cubicle. In most hospitals it may be several hours before you receive the antibiotic treatment that you need – depending on the clinical acumen of the triage nurse and the doctor who first sees you. Yet, if you have Staphylococcus aureus growing in your blood, your chance of dying within a year is around 20%. The queue-jumper with a heart attack has just a 5% to 7% chance of dying within a year.

All medical staff want to do the best for their patients, so why does one set of symptoms (central crushing chest pain) evoke a rapid response, but another (high fever and uncontrollable shaking) does not? For some reason the mortality associated with bacterial bloodstream infections has not become part of the received wisdom of the medical profession. We haven’t been able to make it a ‘no-brainer’ for nurses and doctors that you are more likely to die if you have germs in the blood than you if you have had a heart attack.

Some part of the fault lies with me and with my tribal colleagues. Perhaps we haven’t shouted down the telephone when a patient has been misdiagnosed or when their treatment has been delayed; perhaps we haven’t muscled our way enough into medical school curricula; perhaps we act too much like ground crew in the presence of the cardiology Top Guns; perhaps our drugs are too cheap to attract the powerful marketing forces of the pharmaceutical industry that drives so much of current practice; perhaps we haven’t been able to convince some doctors that things so small can cause so much harm. Sometimes it is not just the nice guys who finish last – maybe our patients do too.

Gone Viral is an attempt to bring this and many other lesser-known infectious diseases issues to the lay reader’s (and their doctor's) attention. I hope that this knowledge will help people to make better decisions about their health care and increase their ability to advocate for themselves and their families within an increasingly complex and overstretched modern health system.

Frank Bowden is the author of Gone Viral: The germs that share our lives, published by NewSouth.

Writing a Memoir

Tanveer Ahmed — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +1100

When my mother told me that the first question that my father asked her when they met in her village on the Indian border was whether she knew the name of a famous economist, I thought she was having me on. When I learnt the next question he asked was ‘What’s seven times eight?’, I realised she was not. My father loves mathematics.

As Milan Kundera wrote, writing a memoir is a struggle between memory and forgetting. I think Kundera might have said it about matters more important, such as the battle of man against power, but it could apply to memoir writing just as well. Memory is a strange beast and the margin between memory, second-hand anecdote and journalism often begins to fade in the writing process.

As a psychiatrist, I often deal with disordered memory, from its manifestations as the negative lens that all memories are filtered through in depression, the prison of a traumatic memory in post-traumatic stress, to the slow fading of memory that precedes the entire loss of self in dementia.

To trigger more vivid memories in the hope of enabling richer writing, I often visited locations of my past: walking around the playground in my old high school before being accosted by security; and touring the grounds of the now shut-down Rozelle hospital, which was the old psychiatric asylum where I began my training as a psychiatrist and where I ended up giving shock treatment. I also looked at old photos and discussed family events with relatives.

Writing about childhood memories, especially those from Bangladesh when I was barely four or five years old, was particularly difficult. In writing these aspects of the book, and obviously the sections where I was outlining my parents’ memories of the Bangladeshi independence war and their courtship in and around it, the writing is as much journalism as it is memoir.

The book also led to a re-union with the childhood friend, Daryl, whose mother provided me with the rissoles. This was special, for there is something unique about childhood friendships. We knew the essence of each other, in spite of two and a half decades without contact, although I never would have foreseen him becoming a pastry chef.

There is also the challenge of what to include and what to leave out. The genre works best when the writing is brutally honest, but there are certainly occasions when utter transparency can do more harm than good, particularly to loved ones or to my own reputation. No book is worth losing close friends or family over.

The process of self-discovery that writing a memoir inevitably becomes has taught me much about the nature of memory and how it shapes the way we see and interpret our lives. There is bound to be much in The Exotic Rissole that may not be exactly accurate, but I probably wouldn’t be able to remember.

Tanveer Ahmed is the author of The Exotic Rissole, published by NewSouth.

Sustainable Chippendale

Michael Mobbs — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +1100

In February 2011, City of Sydney Council announced a plan to build on the lessons learnt from my Sustainable House and the footpath gardens we’ve created in Chippendale. As far as I know, this is the first time an Australian council has attempted to convert an existing suburb into one that uses energy and water sustainably, and which grows food in its streets.

Mayor Clover Moore notified residents of the plan, saying: ‘The City of Sydney has chosen Myrtle Street, and surrounding areas in Chippendale, as a trial site for how to create a “sustainable street”. The aim of this six-month project is to showcase the significant sustainable living features already established in parts of Chippendale and to develop and implement plans for further improvements.’

Perhaps the most exciting part of the project for me is the opportunity to cool the suburb by repaving the roads with pale tarmac, achieving up to 80% tree-canopy cover over the roads, and painting dark roofs a pale colour. When finished, this will cool Chippendale by up to six degrees in summer. (In my book, Sustainable House, there’s a wonderful thermal image of Chippendale taken during the hours between 1am and 5am on 6 February 2009. It shows roads with black tar and no tree cover at over 34 degrees, while houses such as mine are about 29 degrees.)

The Mayor notes that as part of the project, the Council is looking at cooling the suburb, reducing energy costs, introducing more efficient street and footway lighting, harvesting rainwater and establishing additional road and verge gardens. Also proposed are increasing the use of car-share arrangements, providing improved access and safety for pedestrians and cyclists, creating streets, parks and buildings that cost less to build and maintain and growing more local food and increasing biodiversity.

We can’t cool our cities until we cool our roads. To read or download the plan, click here.

And to support it, click on this here.

Since renovating his nineteenth-century inner-Sydney terrace in 1996, Michael Mobbs has harvested rain water, recycled treated sewage, harvested the sun's energy to achieve energy and water bills of less than $300 a year. His book, Sustainable House, first published in 1998, with an updated second edition published in 2010 by CHOICE Books, is the essential guide to help build an environmentally friendly home. This is an excerpt from Michael’s blog looking at exciting official plans to extend sustainability throughout his suburb.

Battling the Sexes

Jane McCredie — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +1100

When a baby was born with ambiguous genitals a generation or so ago, it was pretty much standard medical practice to chop off whatever male-looking appendages might be there and declare the hapless infant a girl.

Clinicians saw the bringing of such unacceptable anatomy into line as an urgent task and generally punted for the female sex because, as the saying went: 'It’s easier to dig a hole than to construct a pole.'

Doctors are a lot more cautious about surgical interventions in intersex children these days – largely thanks to the vocal campaigning of some very angry adult survivors of such medical attentions.

But a lot of scientific inquiry still seems aimed at dividing us all into two neat and tidy categories, two 'opposite' sexes, ignoring the evidence that we humans are actually a great deal more interesting than that.

If you look at the research, you’ll hear a lot of claims made for a fundamental, even irreconcilable, divide between men and women in fields as varied as neuroscience, evolutionary biology and psychology.

You may hear that female brains are innately more suited to multi-tasking, to language use, to empathising. That male brains are designed for narrow focus, for better spatial perception, or for understanding systems.

Or that evolutionary imperatives make men naturally promiscuous, while women are driven to find a single mate who will be a good provider for them and their children.

Often, all of these so-called essential differences between men and women will be traced back to the Pleistocene, when the first humans evolved to meet the demands of the African savannah.

Inside every anxious male bank worker on the morning commuter train is a primal hunter, whose instincts would have him ranging the land in all his physical splendour, while the marketing executive toting her briefcase beside him is really designed to be back in her cave making everything agreeable for his triumphant return.

(Yes, the 1950s-style single breadwinner family may have pretty much disappeared in our Western societies, but it’s still alive and well among some of the evolutionary psychologists.)

When you really look into these sorts of claims about hard-wired characteristics of men and women, it’s hard to find much in the way of quality evidence to support them. Even those differences that can be established between the sexes as a whole tend to be small, subject to change over time, and pretty much irrelevant when it comes to individuals.

When you think about it, there is not a single generalisation about males or females that can be applied to every member of a particular sex. Women can be tall, hairy, aggressive or good at map reading. Men may gossip, lactate, shrivel at the sight of a spider or stay awake after sex.

After spending much of the last two years delving into the research while writing my book, Making Girls and Boys: Inside the science of sex, I’ve come to the conclusion that it makes more sense to think of sex as a spectrum than as a pair of opposites. All of us – male, female, those who resist easy classification – have to find our own place, conforming perhaps to some of the stereotypes associated with our biological sex and not at all with others.

I’m not alone in thinking like this. Some scientists too have turned their backs on the seductive lure of the binary to give us more complex and dynamic descriptions of men and women.

The tired old nature versus nurture debate is giving way in the face of evidence that biology and environment are actually inextricably entwined, that they constantly affect each other in a myriad of unpredictable ways.

When our hormone levels fluctuate in response to life events, they change us on a biological level. When we learn new behaviours, when we fall in love, neural connections rewire, changing the actual anatomy of the soft tissue within our skulls.

The new technologies that are allowing us to look inside our living brains as they think, grieve and desire are also showing us how astonishingly ‘plastic' (capable of change) they can be. Far from being stuck with the behavioural patterns of a Pleistocene hunter, it seems we modern humans actually have some capacity to create our own brains in concert with our ever-changing world.

Over the course of human history, those plastic brains have allowed us to adapt to environments from the Arctic to the Pacific Islands, to set in motion and then grapple with the demands of urbanisation, industrialisation and digitalisation. They have helped us to create new societies, new ways of relating to each other and new ways of being men and women.

I'm not saying sex is irrelevant. For most of us, it's an important part of who we are, and we wouldn't want it any other way. But that doesn't mean we want to be imprisoned by our gender, told that our particular brand of anatomy means we have to behave, feel or think in a particular way.

Male, female, or however we like to define ourselves, we humans are complex creatures, infuriating, entrancing, and most of all unpredictable. Science may be drawn to nice, neat categories but, if we’ve proved anything about ourselves, it’s that we just don’t fit into boxes very well.

This article was originally published on ABC Unleashed. Jane McCredie is the author of Making Girls and Boys: Inside the science of sex, published by NewSouth.